Rampant Games - Guest Post: The Roguelikes #3

Skavenhorde is still going strong with his guest articles on roguelikes, with Part 3 now available and focusing on Linley's Dungeon Crawl and Legerdemain:

Linley’s Dungeon Crawl:
Linley’s Dungeon Crawl was started back in 1995 by Linley Henzell. Henzell left four years later when Linley needed to shift focus to his law degree and stopped developing Crawl. However this was not the end. He released the code under the GPL so anyone could work on it and work on it they did. When Linley left the game was up to version 3.30 and now it’s up to 4.0.0 (beta 26) with a few variants floating around the web. Most notably Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but we’ll talk about that one in a minute. Unfortunately progress on Crawl has seemed to have halted with 4.0.0. The homepage hasn’t posted any news on it since 2004.
Enough history now for the good part. Crawl is a single dungeon roguelike with the main quest being to delve into the depths of the dungeon to retrieve the Orb of Zot and return to the surface. You’ll of course face an assortment of creatures whose only goal is to stop you on this quest.
From most accounts Crawl is a semi-lite roguelike. Easier to understand and jump right into than others like ADOM.

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More information.

After Playing the new Crawl Stone Soup for awhile I realized I should have played this a lot more than I did before writing that article. There are so many new additions that my article hardly mentioned any of the best parts....Well maybe next time.

Heh - it's been a LONG time since I truly got sucked into a major Roguelike. But I've been enjoying your articles a ton. Right now Legerdemain and Incursion both look really interesting, but Dungeons of Dredmor may be my next roguelike addiction.

Dungeons of Dredmor does look great and thank you for reminding me about Incursion. I downloaded that one a looonnnggg time ago. I fired it up one day to just see what it was about and was assaulted with a wall of words. Not that is a bad thing mind you, but the learning curve on that one was a little too steep for me at the time. I was still getting used to these funky controls you use for roguelikes and ADOM had me in its grips. I meant to go back to it one day and sit down to figure out the game, but I had forgotten all about it by then (I'm the kind of person who would forget their head somewhere if it wasn't already attatched)

In any case I'm looking forward to Dungeons of Dredmore more and more. All the info they've posted makes me think that this is one roguelike that will get a ton of my time. Although I haven't played it yet, but it seems to me that it is the 'Quest for Glory' of roguelikes. In that I mean they've put a humorous spin on the whole game.

I'm saving Dungeons of Dredomore for my last article. Hopefully by then I'll have played it enough to know more about the game and won't have to do too much research through their blogs.